U.S. Veterans Administration Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson, right, and combat veteran Wendy Buckingham salute a color guard during the opening session of the National Order of the Purple Heart National Convention, at which Buckingham serves as Women Veterans Issues Director, in Denver, Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2014. Gibson says more employees will be disciplined as the department sorts out a scandal over long waits for health care and falsified data. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

You’d think it would be a tough crowd.

At the Renaissance Hotel in Denver it’s a sea of purple-clad people, mostly older veterans — the men wearing sharply creased purple and white garrison caps. Medals and insignia almost cover their caps, their lapels. They aren’t in uniforms exactly, but they all wear the same color.

This is the 82nd national convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. The Oklahoma man next to me, Frank Casson, says it’s a true hall of heroes tonight. He got his Purple Heart after being blown up by an improvised explosive device in Iraq in 2004.

Gibson hasn’t been at the VA for quite six months. So the current mess isn’t his fault. He served as acting secretary for about two months after Gen. Eric Shinseki was toppled from the post in May by the scandal of ill veterans waiting, sometimes dying, before they could be seen at VA facilities. All the while, administrators falsified waiting times, then reaped performance bonuses for meeting their targets.

“Shinseki was a scapegoat,” Casson said.

Gibson acknowledged the VA was in “the most serious crisis in a generation,” but argued that it presented an extraordinary opportunity to make a compelling case for more resources. He was happy to land in this crisis, he said.

“All I ever wanted was a chance to make a difference,” Gibson said.

But first, he said, the VA had to purge “a corrosive culture of self-protection and retaliation against whistle blowers.”

When he became acting VA secretary, Gibson said, he went to the Phoenix VA hospital, where he met with 75 employees.

“They were often choking back tears,” he said, “about overcoming challenges to care for veterans. What I saw at Phoenix was leadership failure … and chronic under-investment of resources.”

A neurosurgeon there told him that the facility had three X-ray machines, but two weren’t working. Gibson ordered them fixed the next day — a simple fix of updated computer software.

“All it took was for someone to own the issue,” Gibson said.

Gibson has made 14 visits to VA medical centers, including Denver’s on Aug. 6, in the last couple of months.

At San Antonio, Texas, he said, the atmosphere at the VA hospital was one of people brimming with pride in their work and success.

“The irony is the hardest visit for me was San Antonio,” he said. “But for leadership, Phoenix could have looked just like that.”

He promised that the disciplinary actions proposed against six employees involved in scheduling and bonus fraud in Cheyenne and Fort Collins was the first of many such actions.

“A transformation is under way,” he said, “but veterans still wait too long for appointments and the quality of care is not what is should be.”

The VA serves more than 21 military veterans with a $164 billion budget and 321,000 employees. The Veterans Health Administration runs 150 hospitals and more than 800 other clinics. Patient enrollment is 9.3 million.

Gibson said congressional authorization of an additional $15 billion to help fix the VA was an indication that the department had a chance to turn things around.

Of the $15 billion, he said, $5 billion would be used to hire physicians and other medical staff. But $10 billion would be used to purchase medical services outside the VA system — sending vets to the private sector for care.

In the future, Gibson said, he wanted more resources to build internal capacity at the VA — not for outsourcing care. He said it was only OK in certain circumstances, such as in cases of “extraordinary geography, extraordinary technology and extraordinary demand.”

He explained that rural vets who couldn’t get transportation to veteran facilities should have the option to seek care outside the system. He said that certain illnesses that required very specialized medical equipment or physicians justified veterans going outside the VA system. And, in this time of extraordinary demand on services by an aging veteran population, it would have to be met partly outside the VA system.

But it wasn’t what was best for the VA or for veterans, he said.

U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, who pushed for legislation to give veterans increased options to seek private care, once told me that he saw interesting generational differences among veterans. Broadly speaking, he said, many older vets valued the VA as their institution — another memorialization of their contribution to their country. While younger vets, generally speaking, would just as soon go to private-sector medical providers.

“Why do we need a redundant veteran’s health care system?” asked reader Don Sherwood. “Every government function is expensive, inefficient, ineffective, bureaucratic and corrupt. … Private health care is certainly available. Medicare, while bloated, full of waste and corruption, is still better than the government-run VA. Just add a category of Medicare recipients, Veterans, and then eliminate all VA health care operations. It would save taxpayers huge amounts of money, while providing veterans far superior medical care, far more readily available.”

That is not the direction Gibson wants to see. It’s unlikely.

The new secretary, Robert McDonald, confirmed by the Senate July 29, is a 40-year friend of Gibson’s. They were West Point cadets together. Their rooms, offices and mess hall seats were right across from each other their senior year. They know each other well.

“He has one of the strongest moral compasses I’ve ever seen. He always has had,” Gibson said of McDonald. “He had it when he was 21 years old.

McDonald was a paratrooper in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before his 33-year career at Proctor & Gamble Co., which included serving as CEO from 2009 to 2011.

Moral compasses are not lacking in the hall of heroes. It made me wonder why so many of these people expressed loyalty to the VA, when it had been disloyal to them.

In a videotaped message to the convention-goers, McDonald promised: “I will put veterans at the epicenter of everything that happens.”

That’s always been the VA’s lip service.

Comments Off on Many veterans still love the VA — can the promised transformation take place?

Electa Draper is the health writer for The Denver Post and has covered every news beat in a 22-year journalism career at three newspapers. She has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in journalism.